Every day, as I take my son to middle school, I drive past the site of the old Legend Airlines terminal at Lemmon Avenue and Lovers Lane, on the outskirts of Dallas Love Field. And every other day, or so I've been told, I remind my son that I remain a card-carrying Legend Airlines Founders Society Member even though the airline only flew for a few months. And I still have two shrink-wrapped packages of Legend Airlines cocktail napkins should an emergency ever arise and did I ever tell you about the gourmet meals ... oh, I did? Well then.

I bring it up only because not too long ago, a federal judge in D.C. joined me in showing an unusual interest in Legend.

In her little-noticed April ruling, Federal Claims Judge Margaret M. Sweeney determined that the United States of America owes $133 million plus interest and attorneys' fees to the people who built the terminal. The federal government condemned the building in 2006 without giving them so much as a bag of peanuts. And that never should have happened, according to Sweeney.

The Legend planes, parked after the 2001 bankruptcy.

((David Woo/The Dallas Morning News))

You'd have thought a ruling that size would have been a blaring headline, because that's a lot of taxpayer money at stake. Not to mention that Dallas City Hall played a big part in clipping Legend's wings and getting the terminal razed when city officials went behind closed doors to overhaul the Wright amendment a decade ago. But instead, the ruling garnered just a single headline in the subscription-only Law360: "Gov't Owes $133M For Ruined Dallas Terminal."

The only reason I found out about it was because the feds appealed the ruling a few days ago in another federal court in Washington, D.C. I stumbled across it in a virtual stack of filings while looking for something unrelated. Because, sure, I may be an unreasonable nostalgist for failed and disappeared Dallas things, but I don't go looking for Legend lawsuits, even if I do have fond memories of a short-lived airline that let you watch DirecTV whilst chasing lobster with champagne at $300-a-ducat discount-carrier prices from Love to Los Angeles and D.C. among its handful of destinations.

Alan Naul, one of the investors in the terminal and airline, said earlier this week he was a little stunned by the lack of attention given the ruling. He shrugged, repeating something his 24- and 30-year-old kids told him: Maybe it's ancient history?

Legend Airlines President and CEO Allan McArtor visiting with a passenger on a flight to Washington, D.C., during the airline's short-lived time in the sky.

((Jim Mahoney/The Dallas Morning News))

Except it isn't. Naul and the other Legend terminal investors, known as Love Terminal Partners and Virginia Aerospace, haven't seen a penny and won't any time soon. Legend operated from April to December 2000, but the finish line for the lawsuit filed in 2008 isn't anywhere in sight.

"It's been a long time," Naul said. "We can celebrate when we actually have money." Or if. There's always that if.

The judge sided with Naul and the moneymen in an opinion that spans 70 pages and reopens old wounds. It reveals how American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, DFW International Airport's board and the cities of Fort Worth and Dallas conspired to break Legend before it ever got off the ground. But at the end of the hourlong interview, Naul said he hadn't even begun to tell the story of Legend.

He said it's still too soon, given the ongoing litigation, which seems impossible since it's been 16 years since Legend came and went at Love. Those 16 years feel like forever ago, even if the airline did help hasten the demise of the Wright amendment, lead to the modernization of Love Field and foretell the takeoff of affordably luxe carriers such as Virgin America.

"There really is enough in this story to write a great book," Naul said as we were wrapping things up. "But it's a little too crazy. I'm not sure anyone would believe it."

Legend Airlines' inaugural flight left Love Field on April 5, 2000.

((Jim Mahoney/The Dallas Morning News))

From the start, the story was pretty unbelievable: In 1996, Dallas businessman Bruce Leadbetter teamed up with Allan McArtor, a Vietnam War fighter pilot and former head of the Federal Aviation Administration, to take on Southwest and skirt the Wright amendment by using jets with just 56 seats to fly far beyond the adjoining states then allowed by federal law.

But as Ann Zimmerman wrote in the Dallas Observer in October 1997, "by attempting to upset the Wright Amendment status quo, Leadbetter and McArtor took on an issue that rivals the Kennedy assassination in the amount of emotion, suspicion, and controversy it engenders locally." Which turned out to be an understatement considering what came next.

Everyone went after Legend: The FAA, American, Southwest, Fort Worth, DFW Airport, Mayor Ron Kirk, U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, U.S. Rep. Dick Armey. Congress did them a solid in 1997 by clearing the path for Legend's stripped-down 56-seaters. And investors, led by a man named Donald McNamara, sank around $70 million in the airline and the terminal on some land that used to be owned by Braniff.

But threats turned to lawsuits throughout the late 1990s, and by the time Legend was ready for takeoff in the spring of 2000 it was close to being busto. A business model that made it crazy cheap to fly fancy didn't help.

Orchids decorated Legend's first-class terminal at Dallas Love Field.

((File photo))

Legend's first flight took off April 5, 2000, to Dulles International Airport. Eight months later it filed for Chapter 11. Most of its operating capital had gone toward fending off the storm that tried to ground the airline -- which finally included American, which brought its own 56-seat planes to Love to kill Legend.

By early 2001, McArtor surrendered Legend's operating certificate to the FAA.

The people who built and owned the terminal thought at least they could lease it or sell it to other carriers. In '06 they found a taker: Pinnacle Airlines. But just as the deal was about to seal, after all the time and money Fort Worth and Dallas had spent trying to keep Legend from flying past the Wright amendment, Dallas Mayor Laura Miller and her Fort Worth counterpart said they'd come up with a plan to amend the Wright amendment that involved capping the number of Love Field gates at 20 and, by the way, tearing down the Legend terminal.

Once the Wright Amendment Reform Act became official in the fall of 2006, the Legend terminal, which was about to sell for $100 million, had been rendered worthless.

Then came the lawsuits: Love Terminal Partners first sued Dallas, Fort Worth, Southwest, American and DFW Airport, claiming they'd violated anti-trust laws. A federal judge tossed that one. But the 2008 lawsuit, accusing the feds of taking and tearing down the terminal, stuck.

The government tried to bring Dallas in on the suit, but Love Terminal Partners' D.C. attorneys fought against it -- to City Hall's good fortune.

While awaiting the $133 million check he and his partners may never see, Naul's reminded of the old terminal often: His wife likes eating at Celebration, the homestyle eatery just down Lovers.

"She likes to reminisce," he said. "And when I drive past it, I think the same thing I thought when we invested. It's a wonderful location. It's been so long it's not painful."